An enormous relief down here, we feel like our Titanic avoided the iceberg. But the fact that so many supported such crazy policies as the
Republicans do makes us shiver. The mightiest military power in the world!

Anyhow, our elections (municipal) were also quite good, the PT is the most voted party nation-wide, we will be in charge of São Paulo, the third largest budget in the country, and of big symbolic value, as well as of over 600 cities, many of the bigger ones. It was a vote of approval for Lula-Dilma and all the new policies, in spite of the big media having made a huge campaign in the name of political honesty and anti-corruption. Nothing very new here.

We have several hundred cities which signed support for the “sustainable cities movement”, practically all the bigger ones, covering over half the
population. While we wait for big nation-wide or world-wide decisions, at the local level we are promoting sounder policies, changing development culture bottom-up. Slow but coming.

Another very interesting trend here is the use of public banks, which hold over half the banking industry, to curb the commercial-banks cartel, by systematically lowering interest rates and thus changing the financial scenario. Actually, it is this remaining strong public banking sector which protected us from the financial crisis in the first place.

I just read Republic Lost, by Lawrence Lessig, on the line of your “best congress money can buy”, excellent reading, I’ll try to get it translated
here.